Within the depth-psychology corpus, 'Lake' operates on at least three distinct registers that rarely collapse into one another. In the I Ching and its Taoist commentarial tradition — the most densely represented strand — Lake (Dui, trigram ☱) functions as a cosmological-alchemical symbol: the youngest daughter, associated with joyfulness, harmonious receptivity, and the yin-culminating reversion to yang. Liu I-ming and the Cleary translation of the Taoist I Ching treat Lake as an active principle of transformation, notably in the hexagrams Change (fire below lake), Gathering (lake above earth), and the Treading hexagram's meditation on returning the tiger. The image of fire within a lake — moisture and heat balancing each other — becomes a model for the interior work of opposing psychic forces held in productive tension. In Jung's seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra, the lake takes on an explicitly psychological valence: 'the lake of his home' is interpreted, through dream-logic, as the personal unconscious from which the heroic figure departs toward the collective unconscious. Edinger employs the lake idiom eschatologically, quoting Jung's contrast of 'a sea of grace' against 'a seething lake of fire,' illustrating the terrible double aspect of the God-image. The present concordance thus maps Lake across cosmological, alchemical, psychological, and theological axes, with the Taoist material constituting the structural core.
Lake, as the youngest daughter, travels the path of receptive submission in place of mother earth, and is able to revert to yang by the culmination of yin. Its nature is harmonious and joyous.
Liu I-ming establishes Lake as the trigram of harmonious, joyful receptivity that achieves the alchemical reversal from yin-culmination back to yang, making it the operative principle for safe, gradual inner cultivation.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986thesis
he left the lake of his home. Why should such a little thing be mentioned? … Could not the lake of his home be the personal unconscious which he is leaving for the collective unconscious?
Jung's seminar reads Zarathustra's departure from his lake as a depth-psychological movement from personal to collective unconscious, establishing the lake as symbol of the bounded, familiar psychic ground one must transcend.
, Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939, 1988thesis
a sea of grace is met by a seething lake of fire, and the light of love glows with a fierce dark heat of which it is said 'ardet non lucet'—it burns but gives no light.
Edinger cites Jung's pairing of grace-sea with fire-lake as the supreme expression of the God-image's terrible duality, positioning the lake here as an eschatological symbol of divine wrath beyond illumination.
, Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung's Answer to Job, 1992thesis
Above is lake, below is fire; there is fire in a lake. A lake is wet, fire is hot … When moisture and fire are in the same place, the wetness and heat balance each other. This is the image of change.
Cleary's Taoist commentary on Hexagram 49 presents lake-over-fire as the paradigmatic image of opposing elemental forces achieving dynamic equilibrium — the structural basis of all genuine transformation.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986thesis
Above is lake, below is fire … A lake is wet, fire is hot. If there is too much moisture, fire will dry it up; if there is too much heat, moisture will dampen it down.
Liu I-ming's parallel commentary on Change elaborates the lake-fire dialectic as a model for the properly calibrated inner life, in which neither pole overwhelms the other.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986thesis
Above is lake, below is earth; moisture rises onto the earth. When moisture is in the earth and rises onto the earth, everything on the earth is nurtured by it and flourishes.
In the Gathering hexagram the lake above earth signifies the nourishing ascent of moisture, but also warns that gathered resources will disperse unless the practitioner maintains vigilant preparedness.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986supporting
Above is lake, below is earth … moisture rises onto the earth. When moisture is in the earth and rises onto the earth, everything on the earth is nurtured by it and flourishes.
Liu I-ming's version of Gathering foregrounds the lake's fertilizing function while making explicit the limit of any accumulated resource — a caution against passive enjoyment of spiritual attainment.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986supporting
Dui is the root of the Chinese character 'speaking.' … Dui has a variety of meanings. Originally it signified speaking with joy, but it also means exchange in the sense of giving and taking.
Huang's structural commentary anchors Lake (Dui) in the semantics of joyful speech and reciprocal exchange, connecting its cosmological role to communicative and relational dimensions of psychic life.
, The Complete I Ching: The Definitive Translation, 1998supporting
Water with Lake is LIMITATION (60) … Lake with Fire is REVOLUTION (49) … The House of the Abysmal
Wilhelm's systematic house-arrangement reveals Lake's combinatory range — paired with Water it produces Limitation; paired with Fire, Revolution — demonstrating how the trigram's meaning shifts decisively with its partner.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
Water with Lake is LIMITATION (60) … Lake with Fire is REVOLUTION (49)
The parallel Wilhelm edition confirms the same hexagram-house topology, reinforcing Lake's structural position as a transformative pole within the I Ching's combinatory system.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
Tony introduced Jaime to one of the chiefs, Antonio Mirabal, whose native name is 'Mountain Lake.' Thankfully, Jaime was able to convince Mirabal that Jung's world-renown … qualified him to help them transmit the important message
Peterson documents that Jung's encounter with the Taos Pueblo chief 'Mountain Lake' was the historical catalyst for Jung's cross-cultural psychological investigations, linking the lake-name to an originary moment of depth-psychological contact with indigenous cosmology.
, The Shadow of a Figure of Light, 2024supporting
when the Scripture speaks of one mass it evidently does not mean that they were gathered together into one place … The lakes also were formed in the same manner.
John of Damascus situates lakes within a cosmogonic account of water's separation from earth, providing a patristic theological backdrop for the elemental symbolism that informs later depth-psychological readings of watery enclosures.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016aside
around 8,400 years ago, the Black Sea was a freshwater lake, isolated from the Mediterranean Sea by a rocky sill … a catastrophic inflow of Mediterranean seawater into the Black Sea
Harding's flood-myth chapter invokes the Black Sea's origin as an enclosed freshwater lake subsequently overwhelmed by salt water, a mythological boundary-crossing relevant to depth-psychological accounts of the unconscious breaching containment.
, Woman's Mysteries, Ancient and Modern, 1955aside